Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
The last couple of months have been really intense for me. I’ve had experiences where things seemed to come together and then they would fall apart. Some of that, a lot of it, was my own doing. My life has felt like a jigsaw puzzle and every time I thought I had the right pieces, I’d realize something was wrong and I would take the puzzle apart again.
What I discovered in the last couple months is that I really needed to allow myself to break down, and come back together again. Then break down and come back together again. It’s not an easy or fun process and many people will try to avoid it, but we really can’t avoid such work, especially when we need to do it, because what we are breaking down are the patterns of our lives that no longer work. We try to put them together again, in some new variation and maybe some of it works and maybe some of it doesn’t.
What this process has taught me is that in the face of life changes that come your way its important to accept and relax into falling apart, painful as it can be, because when we truly allow ourselves to fall apart we give away all the structures and stories that we’ve told ourselves that lead up to the moment when we fell apart.
It is hard to face those structures and stories and recognize that they no longer serve us, and perhaps have never served us. We want them to serve us. We want to believe in them and believe in how they will shape our lives. And for a time they do serve us, but at some point we outgrow them or come to the limits of them and then we have a choice to make. Do we keep ourselves small, and allow ourselves to be limited, or do we challenge those limits?
When we challenge those limits, our lives may fall apart in the wake of what we learn. We may discover things about ourselves that must be changed and require us to fall apart. Falling apart, in such cases, often feels like madness, because we’re departing from the safety of what we’ve known and choosing to explore the unknown.
Yet it is in the unknown that we begin to pull our lives together again, because of what we discover. What we discover may not be the solution we need, but it challenges us further to discover what we actually want and need. The answers aren’t always easy. Imagine realizing how much you lied to yourself or boxed a part of yourself away. That can be the answer you discover. Sometimes it’s something else altogether, but whatever the answer is, it challenges you even as you pull your life together.
And sometimes you fall apart again. Sometimes you have to put yourself out there on the edge, in an existential place of crisis where you truly discover what you are made of. You think you’ve got all the answers and that at last you’ve found the way forward and then you realize that what you’ve found isn’t quite right and doesn’t quite fit, so you break it apart again. You fall apart again.
It’s hard to fall apart again, because it means you end up in a place of vulnerability and fear. Or perhaps you were always there. Perhaps you just thought you weren’t. The hard truth you might discover is that you’ve got to learn how to embrace your fears and turn your vulnerabilities into strengths. We do that by settling into the experience of falling apart and truly opening ourselves to what it has to teach us. If we can accept that then we can discover how to pull ourselves together, because inevitably we will discover exactly what we need to bring ourselves back together again.
I won’t tell you this is easy. I have experienced more doubt, anger, grief, and other feelings through my process of falling apart. But I have also discovered untapped wells of strength within myself. I have found a path forward and I have realized again and again how transitory all of this is. We think it will last forever and we question our decisions and choices, little realizing that we might just be in the right place and the right time to pull our lives together in ways we couldn’t even imagine, until we let everything fall apart and discovered our truest and best self through the work we chose to do.
